Focus Group Findings
We described employment guarantees to all participants as programs that guarantee that students will have a job within a certain period of time after graduating. If graduates don’t find a job within that time frame, they can be compensated in one of a few different ways. Some programs offer full or partial refunds of the student’s tuition, while others allow students to continue taking coursework for free, and others help students make any loan payments that come due.
Participants in Groups 2 and 3 (recent students and young adults without any posthigh school education) also received an example of the job guarantee once offered by the online education platform Udacity, which specializes in offering online computer-coding courses. In this example, students who wanted a guarantee that they would find a job within six months of graduation (or else get their full tuition costs back) were required to pay 150% of the cost of the program ($1,200 versus $800). We asked all participants whether a guarantee program like this would have interested them when they were making decisions about continuing their education. Participants with any level of posthigh school education were asked if they would have been encouraged to enroll in a different institution from the one(s) they had attended if that institution had offered such a guarantee.
In general, participants reacted positively toward job guarantees. Many participants in each group indicated that such a guarantee would have been interesting to them, had one been available when they were making their posthigh school educational decisions. Some participants in each group thought that a job guarantee would definitely have encouraged them to make different decisions about their education: participants reported that they would have gone to college full-time instead of part-time, decided earlier to continue their education, or enrolled in a different institution. Continue reading “If the student does not reach that income level, the program will provide financial assistance with the student’s loan payments”